Don't lend your hand to raise no flag atop no ship of fools

As the U.S. appears irrevocably on the path to a bankrupt welfare and police state (face it: we were already in trouble after Bush, but Obama has destroyed the middle class and the rich will never generate enough tax revenue to cover his spending trajectory), I've been thinking and reading more about escape plans.

International Living has practical advice, largely oriented toward retirees, on the best places to live and how to navigate immigration and health care systems.

Sovereign Man is geared toward younger John Galt types who refuse to be debt serfs to a corrupt regime. He offers both practical advice (Chile is a current favorite) and a libertarian philosophy:

Think about it. We live under a system where, simply from being born on a piece of dirt, citizens are obliged from birth to pay taxes on our worldwide income, fight and die in foreign wars, pay down the massive debts of our forefathers, etc. None of which we volunteered for.

It’s crazy. This system may have made sense several hundred years ago… the nation state was a natural progression from the days of kingdoms and empires, where people swore allegiance to a genocidal king.

Today, we pledge allegiance to a piece of dirt, to institutions run by criminally incompetent politicians, to neighbors we’ve never met, and to a society that no longer shares our values.

Again, though, technology is rapidly making this system obsolete.

With modern travel and telecommunication, geography hardly matters. We can now forge relationships with people across the globe. Money can be moved across borders in an instant. Many countries offer big incentives to attract foreign residents.

In today’s world, we can live in one country, earn income and do business in another, hold savings in another. This chain can go on almost forever. We can store our gold in another. Receive high quality, inexpensive healthcare in another. Store ‘digital assets’ in another. Etc.

These are no longer tactics of the wealthy. Technology makes this all possible for nearly everyone, if you have the right information.

It's a welcome message for those of us who despair over what's happening in America. While freedom in America is dying, there's a wide world out there, and freedom is blossoming somewhere else.